Forum - Craft Animations - 3d animation tools

Hi,

sorry to ask again for support but after finishing some animations with the 4Wheeler I'm struggling meanwhile with the crawlerTracks: I try to follow the craftCrawlerTrack videotutorial as good as I can but I'm quiet sure that I'm missing something since I'm far from getting any realtime feedback like in the videotutorial. To eliminate any possible resource killer I have only created a CrawlerExt - without any additional high polys. I connect it to the keyboard and drive some test rounds - without parenting "CrawlerExt_01_GravityDirection" to some polyGround in order to gain some simulation speed. So far so good - the CrawlerExt has some animation on it.
Now I add the CrawlerTracks and parent it under CrawlerExt (inside the Craft Director Studio Gui). Like in the video I resize "CrawlerTracks_01_Frame" accordingly to fit the size of "CrawlerExt_01_Wheel_BR" - the right back wheel of my CrawlerExt. Then I align and parent "CrawlerTracks_01_driveWheel" to "CrawlerExt_01_Wheel_BR". Afterwards I open the crawlerTrack Config and create a static inner wheel. Like in the video I align and parent "CrawlerTracks_01_bogie1" to the front wheel of the crawlerExt. Finnally I create the track (about 40 steps) - no problem so far ... but now comes the frustration: if both "CrawlerExt" and "CrawlerTracks" have the key option enabled (like in the video) and I hit record I can't get any useable feedback - it's more than slow. But even if I disable the key switch of the CrawlerExt in order to use the animation I recorded at the beginning and press "resimulate" it takes ages: for a 300 frame animation without any polys in the scene, with a pre-keyed CrawlerExt, with only one driveWheel and one staticWheel ... about 7 minutes ?? On a 2.40 Ghz QuadCore ? Either I have missed something - any trick to speed up the simulation like the "use fast ray cast" in the 4WheelerExt Config - or the PC that was used in the videotutorial is 100 times faster than mine since in the video there was no delay at all ... simply realtime ... I would love to drive my CrawlerExt + CrawlerTracks in a similar fashion.

I'm working with Cinema 4D R11.5

Any help would be great since I'm stuck here

wombat wrote:Hi,

sorry to ask again for support but after finishing some animations with the 4Wheeler I'm struggling meanwhile with the crawlerTracks: I try to follow the craftCrawlerTrack videotutorial ......text text ......

What I usually do when creating an animation with a tank is to first animate the crawler extended and drive that one with a gamepad. After I am pleased with the base animation I check the key for the crawler tracks, uncheck the crawler extended and make a resimulation for that. So I do not make the tracks in real-time.

Also good to mention is that the CDS calculations for Cinema 4D is a bit slower then in Maya, Max and Softimage.

I hope this cleared up a thing or two?

Simulating the tracks after the vehicle can also help starting issues since you can create the track after the wheels and vehicle has become cozy with the ground and you avoid it bouncing down in phases on the first frame of animation.

...well there is my problem too, ...I followed tutorials that I found even with help file & all I get is flying tracks away from the CrawlerExt... like if they were shot in the air... donno where I do something wrong?!?
...while I'm on this theme, I should also say that raycasting is not working... at least I didn't get it to wrok, when I set it to have 10 springs from first to last wheel on a side, & set it to 2 as shown in video tutorial, the crawler is acting same as if that thing is not enabled? Is there any help?

Cheers & tnx, nice work keep up the good work CA Team... can't wait to try out that new realtime dynamic engine...